First Person Shooters

First-Person Shooters are a genre of video game where the player’s character is seen through the first person perspective and centers on using shooting weapons to defeat enemies and advance through levels. These games typically use single or co-operative story modes, and in recent years have seen the expansion of multiplayer aspects, where a player can play against others online. Since their rise to popularity with the games Doom and Wolfenstein, first-person shooters have become the most popular video game genre. This success on such a large scale has also brought ethical implications for first-person shooting video games, such as their focus on violence, their bias towards genders in game design, and the issues of online communication methods.

History

While the earliest versions of first person shooting games can be accredited to the game Maze War and Spasim in the year 1994 , the main rise to popularity of the genre was coined with Wolfenstein and Doom . These games were the first to employ modern graphics and mechanics and were followed by numerous other successful first-person shooting games like Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, and Counter Strike.

While the earliest version of first-person shooters would be limited to PC, the expansion of the genre to console gaming opened an entirely new audience to first-person shooting games. Halo: Combat Evolved released in 2001, and displayed the powers of FPS games using an Xbox. Halo’s success paved the groundwork for the development and focus of game companies of producing first-person shooters for console gaming.

Online Multiplayer

The popularity of first person shooting games saw a marked increase with the addition of online multiplayer modes. Services like Xbox Live expanded the market for simpler connections of players to an online service, as games before like Quake and Counter Strike typically faced issues with slow connections and dial up broadband services. Halo 3, a first person shooter developed by Bungie, was able to use the online aspect of Xbox live to make their multiplayer mode be widely successful. The same year Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, released with similar success to it’s online mode. These games are coined with helping pioneer the online rise of first person shooters, and serving as a template for future first person shooters with multiplayer options.

Ethical Implications

Bias towards Genders

While first person shooters may be the most popular video game genre, women players only make up 7% of the players of first person shooters . Such a drastic disparity in demographics has sparked questions as to why the first person shooter genre is so sided towards male players. However, nearly double this amount of women, 17%, are seen playing the game Overwatch, which has been accredited with a more gender-balanced design in mind that appeals to both men and women. This change in the number of women playing exemplifies that it is in the design of these specific games that cater more to males than females. This is especially true in first-person shooter game's expressive values, as first-person shooters often promote male protagonists or overly sexualized female character models. Studies have even revealed that playing violent shooting games decreases empathy of violence towards females and creates increased masculine beliefs in its players, which makes it apparent that the design of the games does impact the values held by its players.

This bias in application design is not confined to video games, but first-person shooters have been seen having a large effects. In the game industry, women only make up 22 percent of the workforce.